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Horses and Bayonets' Becomes Instant Social Media Meme

It is becoming quite predictable what will be said in these debates that are going to have a meme on the social networks the following day. When it comes to Facebook and Twitter sometimes you will see a meme pop up that you really didn’t expect to see and that happens to be the case with President Obama’s “Horses and Bayonets” comment which has taken off on the social media sites.

Obama made the comment after Governor Romney made the claim that the United States Navy was actually smaller than it was in 1916. Obama’s response was "Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets. ... We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships." This was the kind of comment the online social media community jumped on even quicker than Romney’s “I had binders full of women” comment he made in the second debate.

Almost immediately, the hashtag “horsesandbayonets” was one of the top trending topics around the world. Facebook (News - Alert) saw more than 50 different pages that had some sort of allusion to the Horses and Bayonets meme. Perhaps one of the best zingers to come out of the comment was when the Democratic Campaign Committee made a Facebook post in which it said that, “Obama just sank Romney's battleship." That particular comment got more than 84,000 likes and was shared more than 16,000 times in a single hour.

Most interesting was just how much the presidential debate carried the day on social media, despite a Monday Night Football game and game seven of a very exciting NLCS. Even after San Francisco won the National League Pennant, #Horsesandbayonets was trending at a higher rate by a wide margin.